Bonfire of the vanities: the fortunes and reputations that have gone up in smoke

Sir Richard Branson

It is not every day that one sees £250m evaporate before their eyes. But that isn't the worst of it for Sir Richard Branson. The £5.7bn auction of Virgin Media, in which he holds a 10 per cent stake, would have meant a nice payday for Sir Richard, even if he wasn't the keenest seller. But the sale has been called off due to the market downturn. Worse, the struggling company remains publicly listed, likely to sink even further amid the meltdown.

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Paul Allen

The co-founder of Microsoft may be forced to absorb a loss of £3.5bn if he sells his cable company Charter Communications. Even for the free-spending Mr Allen - he owns a yacht the size of a small cruiseliner, as well as football and basketball teams - Charter has got to hurt. He invested £4bn in it in 1999. Today it is worth less than £0.5bn and has £9.5bn in debt. The loss-making group said yesterday it is examining a sale in difficult trading conditions.

Robert Tchenguiz

The midas touch that allowed Robert Tchenguiz to spin a string of risky property deals into a fortune, that between he and his brother Vincent reached an estimated £850m, seems to have gone cold. In the past couple of months the Iranian property tycoon has seen three refinancing deals worth billions called off, leaving him holding the bag.

Peter Clarke

Since taking the reins of Man Group in March, Peter Clarke has presided over a shocking rout for the world's largest hedge fund. In the past month alone, nearly 30 per cent, or about £2.5bn, has been shaved off the company's market valuation amid bad news for the hedge fund industry in general, and for Man in particular.

Goldman Sachs

The undisputed king of the Wall Street capitalist swashbucklers helped itself to a £1bn piece of humble pie this week. The firm was forced to pump new cash into two of its hedge funds that had collapsed in the panic-selling of the stock market.

Jim Simons

It wasn't too long ago that Jim Simons was the subject of a string of laudatory profiles in the worldžs financial press. The math whiz who founded Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund based on computerised trading, earned him a cool $1.7bn paycheck last year alone. But in the recent market sell off, his fund was among the worst hit. In the first eight days of August, his $27bn fund lost 9 per cent of its value, its biggest one week drop in nearly twenty years.

Ben Bernanke

In times of economic uncertainty, the spotlight is perhaps no brighter than that shone on the chairman of the US Federal Reserve. But the man at the controls of the world's largest economy will be hard pressed to come up with the soothing words the market is hoping to hear amid a rapidly growing number of mortgage-lender bankruptcies, crashing house prices, and a string of forboding statements from America's biggest retailers.

Stephen Schwarzman

When Stephen Schwarzman floated his firm Blackstone in June, it endowed him overnight with a paper fortune of more than £4bn. Since then, Mr Schwarzman has watched more than £1bn of that disappear as the stock has plummeted.